New Swans Track - A Little God in My Hands

I'll admit, until 2012's The Seer I never had as strong an affection for a Swans record. Granted, there weren't a lot of their albums I knew, primarily because, and this may sound a little goofy, but at some point ten years ago or so I purchased the reissue of Cop/Young God/Greed/Holy Money and honestly, it scares me to this day. There is a malevolence that hangs over that record that really gets under my skin. I liken it to watching Silence of the Lambs - Lambs is an amazing piece of cinema that I love just for its craft, but the actual tone of the film - while perfect for the story - puts me in touch with one of the darker, more perverse nooks of the human psyche and I simply cannot go there very often. The same is true of SE7EN, which I love even more for its craft but which tends to absolutely demolish me, each one of my meager three viewings of that particular film sending me on a spiral of paranoid, hate and frustration that takes a few days to recover from. Now, the fact that filmmakers could do that to me with images and sound on celluloid either means I take movies waaaay too seriously or that they are extremely powerful examples of the art; I tend to interpret this as the latter but also know in my heart that it is actually more of a combination of both. The same is true of that early Swans stuff. I sought it out because I had read what an influence they were on Justin K. Broadrick and upon initial listening attempts to Cop/Young God/Greed/Holy Money I saw the influence, but I also caught a glimpse of a hell that seared my psyche and thus have only sporadically gone back to make new attempts at desensitizing myself enough to fully embrace those records.

And then there's the question if I should try to desensitize myself, but I'll leave that to a later day.

All that said Michael Gira and contributors have definitely refined the band with age. Despite my emotional handicap to the old music I've kept up on Swans as a cultural cornerstone and have ear marked the many iterations the group has gone through over the years. The Seer was a record that didn't make my best of list in 2012 because I didn't hear it until the very first days of 2013 and upon hearing it immediately thought that it would probably have ranked in at #2 on that just-published list at the time. The Seer is... all encompassing; a micro-verse in a record's form and something of a journey that I like taking on a somewhat regular basis. These are no longer the bowels of hell Swans take me to, merely some of the more... colorful suburbs of those fantastic realms.

According to the mighty Brooklyn Vegan Swans newest record, To Be Kind, is out on May 13th via Young God. I'll definitely not be waiting until January, 2015 to purchase it.

Swans - The Seer

Okay, so I'm fairly late in the game on this one. I spent a large part of the year (7 months to be exact) holed up and working on a screenplay that may never see the light of day due to artistic disagreements. In that time a lot of music came and went under my radar as I was completely unplugged from any semblence my usual practice of scowering high and low for new stuff. I played MAJOR catch-up during the last two months of the year, the whole time harboring a feeling that one of the albums that "got away" - Swans newest record The Seer yet somehow never managing to transmute that feeling into acquisition. Then, about  a week after I posted my top ten albums of 2012 on Joup a friend of mine gave me a copy of The Seer and I loaded it into my ipod. About a week after that on a day off I put the album on and had trouble ever turning it off.

Frankly, until this record the Swans frightened me a bit. About five years ago I picked up the Cop/Young God - Greed/Holy Money reissue put out by Some Bizzare Records and although I LOVED the music I had a bit of an adverse reaction to the general tone of the record. Now, this in itself is a little out of character for me. I love a lot of dark, sometimes violent music. I'm not a prude and I don't scare easy. However, at the time I bought this record I had just finished reading George Petros' book Art That Kills and it had unnerved me, made me question some of the areas of art that I dabble in. Sometimes things we take at face value have deeper meanings that we don't stop to contemplate. Petros' book - while covering many artists whose work I truly love and consider historically important - also covers some that, well, fell more on the 'leave that the fuck alone' side of things. What's more around this time some strange happenings had resurfaced and to put it very succinctly a friend and I were seriously questioning whether A) a Magick ritual we had crafted in the form of a song for our band The Forest Children had caused a violent crime in our old recording space, or B) we were losing out minds for thinking this might be the case. My initial reaction to the Swans record was a combination of a psychic hangover from Mr. Petros' book, this hazy personal event and, specifically, the lyrics for track #2 on the Swans disc, a song titled Job.

I put the record away for a while.

I am a MASSIVE GodFlesh/Justin K. Broadrick fan and after buying one of the earlier Jesu albums and finding myself smitten with the vocals of Jarboe I made the connection and dug Swans back out. At first I isolated the Jarboe-sung tracks, soaking in the haunting, spectral atmosphere I'd not made it to before. Then I held my breath and gave the entire two discs another spin from beginning to end.

Wow.

The first thing I noticed when I went back to Cop/Young God - Greed/Holy Money was how Michael Gira was so obviously a huge influence on them. Many a band quote Broadrick and GodFlesh as influences but I'd never really delved into what bands influenced them. But the overall tone of the album was just still too dark for me. Actually, dark is not even the tone. While beginning this post a couple of days ago I dug the record out again (much to my wife's chagrin) and listened to the entirety of the first disc. It still takes me to a mental place that I just don't feel comfortable going. But here's the thing - that in and of itself is a feat for an artist. Just because the record causes this reaction in me doesn't mean I don't think it's an important or 'good' record. Au contraire - this makes me think it is something extremely special, to be reserved for special occasions when my inner psychonaut feels the call to places darker than I normally trek.

Anyway, The Seer has trumped much of my list for last year - maybe all of it. It is a magickal, complex and limitlessly rewarding piece of music the likes of which I've not heard assembled in one place before. It is now time then, for me to go back and begin buying all of the Swans records I've missed out on over the years.